


Video games

by stellarel



Series: Thirteen fanzine prompt week stuff [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:28:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24541597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellarel/pseuds/stellarel
Summary: Ryan and the Doctor play video games.That's it.(Thirteen fanzine prompt week drabble)
Series: Thirteen fanzine prompt week stuff [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800295
Kudos: 19





	Video games

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Thirteen fanzine prompt week! The prompt was "out of time" and this is where my brain went.

After spending a few weeks in the TARDIS, Ryan finds the video game room.

He didn't actually know if that’s what it was, really, but that's what he called it in his head, anyways.

The room is comfortably dark in that same, hazy way the rest of the TARDIS was. There's a couch, and a TV that looked suspiciously much like it was from the future - it was embedded in the wall, and when he turned it on the air in front of it seemed to crackle and shift slightly in a way that reminded him of old TV monitors from the 90's.

Unlike the old monitor he had growing up, however, this one seemed to project some sort of 3D image right into the air in front of him. And not the kind of 21st century 3D that looks a bit weird and kind of makes your brain hurt when you try to look at it, the kind that just looks natural.

There's also a wide selection of all kinds of video games, for every possible format, platform and controller he could imagine. He spends a while looking over the consoles that were neatly tucked into the shelves under the monitor, and he recognizes some of them - some from his own childhood, some from TV commercials, and some from when he went snooping around a technology magazine from the future.

Some of the machines he can't quite wrap his mind around - there's one that just seems to be a cube with no markings or buttons on it, but since it's there neatly placed right between SEGA Saturn and Playstation 4 he's assuming it's a gaming console of some sort. There's also a small disk that looks suspiciously much like it might fit right over one of his eyes, and he decides to not touch it, because as a person with a healthy dose of self preservation instincts, Ryan isn't that keen on the idea of future video games being projected right into his brain, thank you.

Then, an alarm sounds, thrumming through the TARDIS in that deep, insistent way it always did. A distress call.

And Ryan is on his way, closing the video game room door and running towards real adventures instead of fictional ones.

He goes out looking for the room again later, after everyone's safe and there's one more crisis averted in the universe, and it seems to be in a different place, now. But he finds it, and he walks in, and the room seems to have shifted just slightly. The lights are more bright, the colors seem to be a bit more vibrant, and the game selection seems to have grown.

Probably not by accident, there doesn't seem to be a single game with any kind of simulated violence involved. No Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed, but plenty of Animal Crossing and Sonic the Hedgehog. Ryan suspects that this was probably intentional; the Doctor didn't like violence, after all.

He inspects the consoles for a while, and after a moment, picks up an old SEGA Mega Drive, plugs it in, and picks out one of the old games he used to play as a kid.

Ryan hasn't played these games in years, but his muscle memory still knows how to hit just the right buttons at just the right times. The controller feels familiar when he holds it, and he didn't really expect to remember the way these games played out, but his hands seem to remember more than his brain does.

The first few levels are easy. He used hours and hours and hours on this as a kid - this stuff is ingrained in his brain, by now. He knows his way around Green Hill Zone just as well as he knows the street he grew up on.

But then he gets stuck. There's a very annoying bit where he gets lost inside a pyramid that starts to fill with water, and he can never just quite make it out in time before Sonic the Hedgehog drowns. The frustration makes his skin tingle and his knuckles tense, and it's not supposed to be _that_ hard, and he's _done_ this before, when he was _ten_ , for god's sake, and he's pulled off more impressive stunts in real life, repeatedly.

Ryan tries again.

And again.

And again.

And Sonic the Hedgehog drowns.

Ryan takes a deep breath, and right as he's about to press A to resurrect and try again, there's a knock on the door.

"Yeah?" He calls out, with only half his brain concentrating on whatever was happening in the room. The other half was invested in whatever was happening on the weirdly lifelike 3D screen.

(Sonic the Hedgehog rises from the dead, and stands at the start of the zone, looking impatient and tapping his foot on the ground slightly out of sync with the music).

Ryan pauses the game.

The Doctor peeks her head into the room.

"Ryan? Are you alright? Your vitals are all over the place, your heartbeat is above average and you seem to-" The Doctor starts, and then she promptly cuts herself off. "-Oh. Not in danger. Good. Just checking." She steps into the room, and looks around for a few seconds.

"Oh, this is a new room. Nice work with the holographic projections." She then says, now more to the ceiling than to Ryan.

"What are you doing?" She shifts her gaze back to Ryan, who is doing his best trying to keep track of the more or less one-sided conversation.

His brain catches up, and he makes a vague hand gesture towards the screen. "Playing this game. Trying to get through this one pyramid zone, but it's bloody impossible to get out of the maze before the time runs out. I've tried like a billion times." He explains, and the Doctor tilts her head a little, peering at the screen.

Then, she walks into the room properly, and sits down to the couch next to him, cross-legged. "Can I help?" She asks, looking at the screen with the same intensity she examined any problem with.

Ryan shrugs a little. "Sure." He turns to look at the screen too. "You can keep an eye on the timer. And the air supply."

"Air supply?"

"You'll see." Ryan says, and presses start. He's pretty sure the Doctor would be able to connect the dots as soon as the pyramid started to fill with water.

He makes it through the first few save points, and even escapes the water once, and the Doctor is watching intensely, eyes fixed to the screen.

"This isn't what pyramids are like on the inside at all." She points out.

Ryan would raise his eyebrows, if he had the brain capacity to concentrate on things as trivial as facial expressions at the moment.

Sonic the Hedgehog is underwater again, and the music is starting to get annoyingly intense in that way that made all your instincts scream _you're in danger._

"Ah. I see. You need gills." The Doctor says.

"Not sure that's an option here." Ryan manages through gritted teeth.

"I'm pretty sure I could slip that into the base code."

"That's cheating."

The Doctor shrugs, and focuses on the game again, silently accepting that maybe it would be cheating. She _could_ do it though.

After Ryan loses the game a few more times, the Doctor is pretty sure she knows where the root of the problem is.

"You're skipping over a shortcut in the beginning. That's why you run out of time."

"Where?"

"Right at the-" She tries to explain, but it ended up being quite hard - the level was designed to look exactly the same around every corner, and confusing on purpose, and really, the shortcut would have been near impossible to spot unless you knew how to look at the pixels that shifted just slightly when you passed them. "Can I have a go?" She tries, head a little tilted.

Ryan takes a deep breath. "Yeah, be my guest." He hands the controller over, and his shoulders slump a little.

It would probably be good for his eyes - and his brain - to focus on something else for a change, anyways.

The Doctor starts playing, tongue pressed between her teeth, and suddenly Ryan is very thankful of the ridiculously long wires on the controls, because the Doctor is moving around as much as is physically possible when you're sitting down.

She had seen Ryan do this enough times to know what she should do, and really, with her Timelord brains and incredibly quick reflexes, it wasn't that hard to slip through the zone and over to the next one.

The Doctor grins, and Ryan stares at the screen with his eyes wide. 

She hands the control back to Ryan.

"We're doing the next game in the two player mode." He says. "You can be Tails."


End file.
